Pros:

Cons:

On paper, Lair sounds like a brilliant and faultless stroke of genius, but somehow developer Factor 5 has managed to eviscerate the amazing concept of mounted all-out dragon warfare, stripping it of whatever potential fun it may have had. This happened in a variety of ways, but we want to focus on two that are not as subjective as the art direction or the crappy and all-too-frequent voiceovers, and those are the lousy motion controls and broken game design.

Drunken Dragon Driving

First off, Lair locks you into using the questionably quirky PS3 motion controls for no apparent reason -- it's not like the analog sticks are used for anything besides simple camera controls which are completely useless because your dragon can't really turn his head to shoot at things to the side of you anyway. This wouldn't be a horrible, fun-crippling flaw if they actually worked, but unfortunately there are a few key maneuvers that are nearly impossible to pull off with any degree of consistency.

Chief among these jerky motion controls is the swift upward motion required to turn your dragon around. When done properly, your dragon will execute an Immelman turn (a barrel roll while performing a vertical half loop) and turn around 180 degrees. You will likely only see this move once or twice though, because the motion-sensing controls simply can't discern between the motion of jerking the Sixaxis upwards and thrusting it forwards (the motion to get your dragon to surge forward very quickly). The result is that every time you want to try to turn around, you run the very likely risk that you will instead accelerate forward extremely rapidly, which is probably the exact opposite of what you wanted to do in the first place.

This example is kind of a metaphor for everything Lair does: whatever you want from this game, it will proudly and haughtily give you the opposite. It's almost as if the game has some kind of deep-seated hatred for gamers and its opportunity to wreak unholy vengeance on all of us has finally arrived. And it gets worse, because the motion-sensing controls of Lair are incapable of registering tilt on more than one axis. That means that whenever you want to turn, you can forget about ascending or descending. Severely limiting your ability to actually play this game, the lack of control is a serious deficit to any kind of enjoyment you may seek.

Not Poor, But Broke

The vendetta against gamers is also carried out in Lair's tragic design which seems as though it was crafted in crazy land. You are constantly bombarded by seemingly nonsensical mini-cutscenes that interrupt gameplay (while not actually pausing the game, mind you, because you continue to get harassed by enemies while these little things play) in order to point out your imperfections like a rude and overbearing family member. Who thought that it was a good idea to cut to a scene of one of the Mantas (pudgy flying manta rays used for ferrying bombs around) that you are charged with protecting as it explodes in midair instead of just having it explode in midair? It's not a good idea at all, in fact, it's annoying and infuriating... but you should get used to it, because you're playing Lair.